Equinox/p2/Director application

The director application is a headless way of performing some of the p2 operations such as installing or uninstalling installable units. Given the appropriate metadata, this application is capable on provisioning a complete installation from scratch or simply extending your application.

Depending on the needs, this application can be executed inside or outside of the application being provisioned

Terminology

the application performing p2 operations such as install or uninstall. This application is provided by the org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director.app bundle.

Provisioning operation

an operation installing, uninstalling features.

Target product

the installation targeted by the provisioning operation.

Running inside the target application

In this mode, the provisioning operation happens from within the targeted produced that you are provisioning. It is equivalent to starting up the targeted product and using the p2 UI to perform the equivalent operation.

This means that the target application has to be in a runnable state and that it has to contain the director application bundle. Also since the target product will have run, cache files will have been created in the configuration folder (e.g. configuration/org.eclipse.osgi).

The following example shows the command line used to install CDT into the SDK.

Provisioning without running the target application

In this case the provisioning operation is happening "outside" of the targeted product. The "targeted product" is *not* started. This allows to both modify an existing installation and create a complete installation from scratch given proper metadata.

It also has the advantage that since the targeted product does not need to be started, the provisioning operation can be performed on any platform for any other platform (e.g. on my windows machine, I can create add plug-ins to a linux-based target application).

Installing / uninstalling IUs into a target product

To install or uninstall something into an existing target product a few extra arguments than in the "inside" mode need to be set. It mostly consist in letting the provisioning operation the ID of the profile it needs to operate on, and where it is located on disk.

For example, if from a directory called "d:\builder", I want to install CDT into an existing SDK located into "d:\eclipse", I will use the following command line. It is important to note the presence of the VM args and set it properly.

Note that there is no need to describe the os/ws/arch of the platform being targeted because all this information is already being available in the profile.

Installing a complete product

The creation of a complete product using the director application only needs a few extra arguments to the previous example. Most of these consist in values used to initialize the profile in which the application will be provisioned.

The following example demonstrate how to create a linux/gtk installation of the Eclipse SDK into a folder called "d:\eclipse" using a director application located in "d:\builder".

The -p2.* arguments describe the os/ws/arch that the provisioned product is targeting.

Here again notice the presence of the -vmargs pointing at the eclipse data area for the installation being created.

Arguments Description

-application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director.app.application

the application ID.

-metadataRepository

the metadata repository where the installable unit to be installed is found.

-artifactRepository

the artifact repositiry where the artifacts will be found.

-installIU

the identifier of the installable unit to install. If you are looking to install a feature, the identifier of the feature has to be suffixed with ".feature.group".

-version

the version of the IU to be installed. If not specified, the highest version available in the repositoy will be picked.

-destination

the folder in which the targeted product is located.

-profile

the profile id containing the description of the targeted product. This ID is usually found eclipse.p2.profile property contained in the config.ini of the targeted product. For the Eclipse SDK the ID is "SDKProfile"

-profileProperties

a comma separated list of <key>=<value> pair. The property org.eclipse.update.install.features=true will cause the update manager features to be installed.

eclipse.p2.data.area

this property points at location of the profile registry containing the description of the profile set in "-profile". It is recommended to set it to be <destination>/p2. This property *must* be set as a VM argument.

-bundlepool

the location of where the plug-ins and features will be stoed. This value is only taken into account when a new profile is created. For an application where all the bundles are located into the plugins/ folder of the destination, set it to <destination>.

-p2.os

the OS to use when the profile is created. This will be used to filter which OS specific installable units need to be installed.

-p2.ws

the windowing system to use when the profile is created. This will be used to filter which WS specific installable units need to be installed.

-p2.arch

the architecture to use when the profile is created. This will be used to filter which architecture specific installable units need to be installed.

-roaming

indicates that the product resulting from the installation can be moved. This property only makes sense when the destination, bundle pool are in the same location and eclipse.p2.data.area is set to destination/p2. This value is only taken into account when the profile is created.